Every week for more than 13 years, I have been pouring tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free (and ad-free) and is made possible by patronage. It takes me hundreds of hours a month to research and compose, and thousands of dollars to sustain. If you find any joy and solace in this labor of love, please consider becoming a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good lunch. Your support really matters.

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Also: Because Brain Pickings is in its twelfth year and because I write primarily about ideas of a timeless character, I have decided to plunge into my vast archive every Wednesday and choose from the thousands of essays one worth resurfacing and resavoring. Subscribe to this free midweek pick-me-up for heart, mind, and spirit below — it is separate from the standard Sunday digest of new pieces:

On Loving Animals: A Visual Study of Affection and Its Extremes

What in-bred pugs and retired show cats have to do with the human capacity for selflessness and solipsism.

By Maria Popova

A few weeks ago, we contemplated the secret emotional lives of animals in the wild, but what about the emotional lives of domesticated animals and their human companions? Whether or not those frequent humorous allegations of physical resemblance between pets and their owners are true, one thing is certain — there’s undeniable emotional synchronicity between human and animal that comes with owning and loving a pet. That’s exactly what Dutch photographer Isabella Rozendaal explores in On Loving Animals — a visual chronicle of what Rozendaal calls “the Dutch and their obsessive, sentimental and sometimes inconsiderate love of animals.” From retired show animals to post-op cats to long-haired dogs with braids and barrettes, these portraits are sometimes tender, sometimes traumatic, and always unabashedly intimate, capturing the rich nuances of what it means to share a life with another being.

[The project’s] aim is to show how the animals are part of our lives, and how we project our own needs onto these beasts.” ~ Isabella Rozendaal

Many of the photographs capture the tragicomic disconnect between the owner’s intention and the pet’s felt experience, as in the case of this clearly not bemused retriever undergoing a doggie spa treatment:

Or the more systemic issues of humans projecting their superficial preferences on nature, as with pugs — dogs once bred to resemble adorable puppies, a “design” that has resulted in troubled breathing due to their compact snouts (which is why you often hear pugs snort), in addition to a host of other health issues stemming from inbreeding.

Visually simple and conceptually rich, the project is as much a voyeuristic tour of other people’s lives as it is a reflection on universal human needs and fault lines on the edges of love and its mutations.

But, ultimately, On Loving Animals is more a portrait of human psychology, with all its capacity for selflessness and propensity for solipsism, spanning the full spectrum of affection and its obsessive extremes.

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Every week for more than 13 years, I have been pouring tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free (and ad-free) and is made possible by patronage. It takes me hundreds of hours a month to research and compose, and thousands of dollars to sustain. If you find any joy and solace in this labor of love, please consider becoming a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good lunch. Your support really matters.

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Sunday newsletter

Brain Pickings has a free Sunday digest of the week's most interesting and inspiring articles across art, science, philosophy, creativity, children's books, and other strands of our search for truth, beauty, and meaning. Here's an example. Like? Claim yours:

midweek newsletter

Also: Because Brain Pickings is in its twelfth year and because I write primarily about ideas of a timeless character, I have decided to plunge into my vast archive every Wednesday and choose from the thousands of essays one worth resurfacing and resavoring. Subscribe to this free midweek pick-me-up for heart, mind, and spirit below — it is separate from the standard Sunday digest of new pieces:

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